Keyword: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 44, was left unconscious after she fell over when a man violently confronted her while the conservative former minister was campaigning for next Sunday's legislative elections at a street market in the Latin Quarter of Paris on Thursday morning.

The end of the regional elections in France last weekend was the starting gun for another contest – to choose the Right's candidate for the next presidential election. Already, ahead of this primary scheduled for the autumn of 2016, two clear ideological lines have emerged as have a host of competing candidates. Just one factor seems to unite them all and that is hostility towards their own leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is widely blamed for assisting the rise of the far-right Front National. Ellen Salvi reports.

Paris is about to have its first woman mayor in the city's long history. But the certainty that either socialist Anne Hidalgo or right-wing candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet will take the reins of the French capital after the two rounds of local elections that start this Sunday masks the fact that most French towns and cities will be run by a man whichever of the main parties wins the local vote. An examination of the mayoral election candidates by Mediapart has revealed that the great majority are male, white – and not very young. Lénaïg Bredoux and Ellen Salvi report on the slow progress made by the country's two major mainstream parties in making their politicians more representative of the populace.